Philippine E-Journals

Education or Economics?

Salvador Roxas Gonzales

Discipline: Economics, Education

 

Abstract:

Thomas Robert Malthus, the Cambridge economist, had a father who used to say every morning at breakfast that every day in every way, the human race is getting better and better". The young Thomas got tired of this daily incantation and he tried to find a leak in that kind of reasoning. He published his famous Essay on the Principles of Population (1798) in which be pointed out that the picture was not as rosy as all that, for the tendency of the population of the world was to grow in geometric progression (1,2,4,8,16,32, etc.) whereas the food supply increased arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5,6,etc.).